ICEBlock Official

You must now keep the app open at all times. This was in the notes of the 1.4 update. If you close the app by swiping up to terminate, notifications will not be delivered.

Remember that you will only see sightings and receive notifications within a 5 mile radius of your location.

What do you mean? It’s working for almost 1 mil people every day.

We’re unable to dm them (they don’t allow it).

If you have a connection to them please put them in contact with us. Happy to speak with them, do a training, or whatever we can do to help.

Thank you for helping to protect children during these crazy times.

If you don’t see it yet, Apple is rolling it out as we speak. Might take a few.

We can’t stop making it better!

Version 1.44 is now available.

This update implements a fallback if Apple’s reverse geocoding fails, prevents empty notifications from being delivered, corrects a UI issue when centering on a sighting, improves bad language detection, and more.

Spread the word!

How do you update an app?

You can do it the same way you downloaded the app. Instead of install or “get” you’ll be able to update.

Sometimes your apps are also set to auto-update at regular intervals but it’s better to do it asap.

Update 1.43 Released

This resolves a silent background crash and more reliably delivers notifications. It also resolves some smaller screen UI and scrolling issues.

Please update asap and spread the word!

There’s a nice new modifier in the code we are using that only enables scrolling if the content is too long for the screen. Our best guess is since you can see half of it scrolling is not enabled. If there more reports below it scrolling would be enabled.

Regardless, we’ll fix it. What device?

That’s what we’re saying. We also fixed the vertical scrolling issue and just tested it on an iPhone XR. Works perfectly for us.

Only the list itself is scrollable when the content exceeds the height of the screen. Perhaps the last row is still halfway on screen and scrolling isn’t becoming active?

This was fixed in the latest update and we just tested it with a list of 20 test sightings and it scrolled perfectly. Did we miss something else?

Critical Update Released - Version 1.42

This release corrects the issue of no reported sightings showing when you are on the move, as well as resolves a background task causing silent crashes.

Please update immediately and spread the word to others.

As always, let us know of any bugs asap.

since the last time your fetched. However that breaks all fetches if your location changes because of course reported sightings would be older than your last fetch. That has been removed.

Our sincere apologies.

You’re not crazy. We spent hours today looking into why this might be happening and found the issue. We’re submitting the update to Apple as we speak and hopefully it will be approved tomorrow.

Full transparency:
In our efforts to avoid Apple’s rate limits we were only fetching new sightings

Also, make sure you are not terminating the app (do not swipe up to close) and it remains open at all times whether in the foreground or background.

Uninstalling and reinstalling won’t do anything. The new way of fetching sightings is much more accurate to the 5 mile radius and with the new database there are also new protections against false reports.

We just tested creating a sighting and it shows up as it should. We then marked it for deletion and it disappeared as it should. Perhaps you are not zoomed in enough to query within a 5 mile radius of a sighting? The new system is much more accurate.

Version 1.41 is now available. Please update asap.

This fixes the notification issues.

It appears there was another small issue with the new way we are calculating the location info so we removed it from app review and fixed that too. We’re resubmitting shortly.

The app was showing the correct info in the app but notifications were appearing outside the 5 mile radius.

Growing pains.

That’s it. It’s a standard notification but the text was converted to be available/translated into all supported languages and the format got screwed up. It’s resolved in the next update.

For right now, know that if you see that, you can open the app by tapping on it and see the reported sighting.

We are aware of an issue with notifications not translating properly and instead showing code. It’s already been resolved and a new update has been submitted to Apple (1.41).

Hopefully it will be approved quickly. Our apologies.

1. There is no user data to turn over. This has been independently verified multiple times by respected parties including the EFF.

2. Much more is done on-device with this update and if the app is terminated, because we are no longer using push notifications, we can’t wake it up.

IMPORTANT NOTE RE: v 1.40

This update changes the way data is stored/retrieved. Until a majority of users update you may not see all reported sightings because the new version uses a new database while the old still uses the previous one.

It may take a few days but users generally update quickly.

Massive Update, Version 1.40
Download Now

Notifications are now solely done on device and sightings no longer query based on your location.

This also means that ICEBlock should never be closed. Just leave it running in the background.

Tons of new features and languages!

We will not be intimidated.
We will not stop.
No human is illegal.
#resist

Yes. The next update limits those types of words in every supported language. It’s too bad terrible people feel this kind of thing is appropriate so we took care of it.

There is a major update coming hopefully next week that will resolve this. It’s out of our control because of Apple and we are taking them out of the equation as much as possible.

It’s not. Of course there will always be a few here and there but we have multiple safeguards in place to prevent this like;

1. One report every 5 min
2. No duplicate reports
3. All reports auto-deleted in 4hrs
4. Only report within your 5 mile radius
5. Must be a valid address

There is an account on X called ICEBlockApp that is impersonating us, reposting what we post here on BlueSky, and trying to gain a following. We have reported this to X and are waiting to hear back.

This is the only official account for ICEBlock on social media at this time.

We received a disturbing e-mail from someone named Nick Waytowich, who claims to have built an Android version of ICEBlock and wants permission to use our name and logo.

We immediately responded denying this request.

Whatever name he ends up using, he works for the US government. DO NOT TRUST IT.